Bill Irwin: Robin Williams existed in his own sphere

Bill Irwin of Nyack talks about his role in Bye Bye Birdie in his dressing room at Henry MillerÕs Theatre in New York City Sept. 24, 2009. ( Peter Carr / The Journal News )(Photo: PETER CARR, Staff TJN)

Actor and comedian Bill Irwin met Robin Williams in Malta in 1980, on the set of Popeye. Years later, they did improv together a few times, appeared in a star-studded 1988 Lincoln Center production of Waiting for Godot and clowned around in Bobby McFerrin's Don't Worry, Be Happy video.

"Robin had a sort of closeness with anybody and everybody, but he also had to maintain a distance for lots of interior and exterior and logistical reasons," Irwin, a Nyack, New York resident said in a phone interview from San Francisco, just across the bay from Tiburon, Calif., where Williams' lifeless body was discovered on Monday, in what has been ruled a suicide by hanging.

"I don't know that I ever knew Robin very well, but he was always generous to me," Irwin said.

Oscar-winner Williams' style was a verbal tommygun stream of consciousness; the Tony-winning Irwin plays a silent clown in baggy pants and top hat. But the two collaborated on McFerrin's 1988 video, one of the earliest viral videos long before YouTube. They danced wordlessly in front of the camera, playing off each other.

"You don't want to sound fawning, or like press-agent puffery, because that's what most of us have been reduced to," said Irwin. "It's hard to find words, so everybody goes to the standard and sort of banal about how great he was. Even when I didn't like what he was doing, thinking it didn't make the best use of his gifts, even then you'd just look at him as a creature in a different sphere."

As an improv partner, Williams was in his element, Irwin said.

"I was on stage with him in improv a few times and only for a few seconds in all that time did I feel I was anywhere near being a partner or an equal player. Most of the time I thought 'Robin will see this through. He knows what he's doing.' And he can see in my eyes that I'm looking to him and he'll shepherd us through to some safe conclusion. I'm playing Robin's game and he will take care of me."

On stage in 1988's Waiting for Godot, with Steve Martin, F. Murray Abraham and Irwin, Williams was fierce, Irwin recalled.

"We were in this intimate theater and we'd look out and see a Lincoln Center subscriber dozing off. Robin went into a warrior berserker mode. People do not drift off. You might leave. You might yell or heckle, but you do not drift off when he's on stage. You could see it rising in him. He'd get closer to that person and raise his voice. We were on a set covered in sand — and maybe I'm imagining this — but I remember him starting to kick sand toward the elderly patron.

"It's probably too early to try making sense of it, but it may just be that there was only room in the world for Robin at his strongest. Like Michael Jackson, Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, there was maybe no viable old-age option. They burned so bright, like a supernova."

Hollywood tried in vain to find Williams' equal.

"You'd get called into casting sessions and they'd say 'Here's the script, but don't pay any attention to it. Just go wild and invent!' They all thought maybe there's a half-a-dozen of these geniuses around. But that's the effect he had on the industry, producers were saying 'My God! There's nobody like him. He's changed the whole complexion! How can I find another one, cheaper?"

Irwin had hoped to work with Williams again.

"It's shocking to think of the universe now without Robin Williams' energy, even muted. I have a script half-written that I kept thinking, 'God, if I got this totally written, maybe Robin would read this.' That's the place he occupied."